


How Much Your Nanny Loves You

by freyjawriter24



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: (i mean there's only two of them in it but still), Child Warlock Dowling, F/M, Finger Painting, Fluff, Gardener Aziraphale (Good Omens), He/Him Pronouns For Aziraphale (Good Omens), Nanny Crowley (Good Omens), Painting, Pre-Relationship, Romeo and Juliet References, She/Her Pronouns for Crowley (Good Omens), Warlock Dowling Loves Nanny Ashtoreth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:35:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27899203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freyjawriter24/pseuds/freyjawriter24
Summary: Our favourite celestial pair look after Warlock Dowling together. Today's activity? Finger painting!***Written for the OTP Prompts event with the prompt “Crowley and Aziraphale finger painting with their child”, which I’ve interpreted as Nanny Ashtoreth and Brother Francis finger painting with Warlock.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 25
Collections: Good Omens OTP Prompts Event Works





	How Much Your Nanny Loves You

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this fic has been adapted from the following quote by Pam Brown (because the way I name my fics now is '[keyword] quotes'):  
> 
>
>> _"You never realize how much your mother loves you till you explore the attic - and find every letter you ever sent her, every finger painting, clay pot, bead necklace, Easter chicken, cardboard Santa Claus, paperlace Mother's Day card and school report since day one."_
> 
> Thank you so much to [IsleofSolitude](https://archiveofourown.org/users/isleofsolitude) for creating the art for this fic!
> 
> Many thanks also to [cumaeansibyl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cumaeansibyl) for beta reading this (on very short notice!).
> 
> And of course, thank you to [bisasterdi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bisasterdi) and [darcylindbergh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/darcylindbergh) for organising this event. You're amazing!

* * *

_Beautiful,_ Aziraphale thought, as he stood in the doorway to Warlock’s playroom, watching Nanny Ashtoreth try to wrangle a child’s painting easel into submission. She was doing well to maintain her careful Nanny persona for the most part, even as the easel fought back and refused to fit into its proper shape, but occasionally flashes of Crowley broke through – that quirk of her eyebrows, that baring of her teeth. And she was _beautiful_ with it.

Yes, he was allowed to say that. Or at least to think it. No harm in thinking something as simple as that, was there? After all, beauty was simply a... an aesthetic preference, nothing more. To say Crowley was beautiful wasn’t _admitting_ anything. No. It was just the same as saying she was demonic. Or wily. Or clever. It was just a simple fact, as subjective as it was. An opinion. And that was alright, wasn’t it? He was allowed to have opinions, wasn’t he?

“You gonna help, or what?” Crowley hissed in Aziraphale’s direction, Nanny’s Scottish accent abandoned for the time being.

Aziraphale jumped a little. He hadn’t realised she’d known he was there. “Um, ah, yes.” He glanced quickly behind him, checking there were no humans in the corridor to hear him speaking without his own carefully-chosen accent. He really needed to get better at that.

“Shut the door, it’ll be fine,” Crowley said without looking at him. Aziraphale did as he was told, relieved to have his unspoken concerns soothed.

“Why don’t you just miracle it?” the angel asked, heading towards the cardboard box the easel had come in, on the hunt for some kind of helpful instruction booklet to read.

“Because then it would _win_ ,” Crowley said grumpily. She released the easel, which teetered in place for a moment, looking almost like the picture on the box, before flopping to the floor in a flat mess. The demon sighed heavily and sat back on her heels. “And, y’know. Just in case someone walked in and saw.”

Aziraphale looked at her, then looked pointedly at the door. Crowley rolled her eyes obviously behind her sunglasses, then gave in, snapping her fingers at the easel. It instantly assembled itself, jumping to attention and looking far more solid and sturdy than any rickety little children’s toy had any right to be.

The angel frowned down at the instruction-less box – ‘easy to assemble!’ the gaudy cardboard lied cheerfully – and decided the best place to keep it would be on top of the tall toy cupboard Crowley was now rifling through.

“Ah-ha!” the demon said, as Aziraphale slid the box out of sight. She reappeared from the depths of the cupboard with a folded pile of colourful, plastic-looking fabric.

“What on Earth is that?”

“Painting mat and aprons.”

Nanny-mode was back now. Aziraphale watched in mild horror as the plastic was unravelled into a large white sheet, a bright red apron, and a blue and yellow garment more akin to a t-shirt than anything else, though with velcro holding together its open back. Nanny Ashtoreth laid the sheet out in the middle of the room and carefully positioned the easel in the dead centre of it.

“Didn’t they use to use newspapers for that?” Aziraphale sniffed derisively at the plastic sheet on the floor.

“Yes, but this is better,” Nanny said, collecting the cherry-red apron from the table and hooking the neck strap carefully over her pristine hairdo. “It’s reusable.”

“The newspapers were recyclable,” Aziraphale pointed out. “And they were usually lying around anyway, so you didn’t have to buy something extra.”

Ashtoreth rolled her eyes again. “No one buys _newspapers_ anymore, angel.”

“They do! I see them all the time. They have them at tube stations.”

“Well, yes. But not in places like this. Not for kids to use.”

Aziraphale decided to drop the discussion and tilted his head in an accepting gesture.

Nanny smiled then, a small, hidden thing, just for him. She gestured with the apron strings. “Come and do me up?”

For a second, the breath caught in Aziraphale’s throat. It was a simple enough request, except – but they’d been doing this for ages now, literal _ages_ of human history, it shouldn’t be so shocking. And yet it still gave Aziraphale a secret thrill every time.

A simple enough gesture – a tiny, human request for help – except it meant a demon requesting aid from an angel, a demon knowingly turning her back on an angel. It was tiny, trivial, nothing. It was huge, monumental, everything.

Aziraphale stepped forward, slow and careful and non-threatening. Crowley turned away from him and held the apron straps out behind her. She could easily do it herself, he realised as he took them. They were long enough that she could cross them over at her back and do them up at the front. She was also dextrous enough to tie them behind her without looking, not to mention that a quick miracle would suffice. But no, she’d chosen Aziraphale.

He held the strings reverently, and tried not to make her regret her decision.

A firm knot, then a simple bow, then gathering up and knotting the bow again just to be sure. It sat neatly in the small of her back, nestled in the curved base of her serpentine spine, and for an instant Aziraphale knew what Romeo had meant about the glove.

Then he got ahold of himself and stepped away. “All done there for you,” he said, affecting his gardener accent again and pretending to himself as hard as possible that nothing had happened, that there was nothing significant about this at all.

A moment later, the sounds of an excitable toddler being escorted down the hall could be heard, and they were both rescued from trying to find something to break the sudden tension in the room.

“Nanny!” Warlock crowed as he pushed open the door. Brother Francis nodded in thanks to the black-suited security guard beyond it as Nanny Ashtoreth crouched down and allowed the child to barrel into her for a hug. The door closed again, and then it was just the three of them.

“Now, Warlock, do you know what we’re going to be doing today?”

The child shook his head energetically, and Brother Francis smiled a little at the sight. Children could be rather sweet, in their own way, but he was still grateful that Crowley had offered to take the lion’s share of the childcare in this particular situation. It was enough for him to influence Warlock positively by speaking with him, playing games with him occasionally, teaching him things about the garden and nature and the world, without having to also clean him up when he was messy and put him to bed when he wasn’t tired and deal with his seemingly random tempers. And all without the use of miracles, too. If the situation wasn’t what it was, Aziraphale might have been inclined to call Nanny Ashtoreth a saint.

“We’re going to be doing some painting!”

Nanny Ashtoreth picked up the yellow and blue plastic t-shirt thing from the table and helped Warlock into it. It was practically a dress on the child, since he was still so small, but Nanny was more than happy to help Warlock roll up his sleeves so they didn’t get in the way.

She introduced the boy to the paints next, getting him to shout out the colours of each one, and loudly praising ‘her little Lord of Darkness’ when he got them right. Aziraphale took a seat at the playroom table, not willing to get too close for what came next, and not having anything better to do for the rest of the day. [1]

Within seconds of the paints being opened, the plastic sheet at Warlock’s feet became splattered with a range of bright colours – not to mention the child’s face, hands, and apron-shirt. Nanny’s apron remained remarkably clean.

“That’s it, you cheeky little Spawn of Satan!” she smiled as Warlock jabbed his fingers into the red and yellow paint and began smearing the paper on the easel with it.

She left him to it for a bit, letting him get the hang of knowing how much paint to get on his hands at a time so it would spread it right and not all gloop together, and then she set about teaching him how the colours mixed.

“See, where the red and yellow are next to each other? What colour is that?”

“Orange!” Warlock said joyfully.

“What about red and blue?”

“Purple!”

“And can you see which two you mixed to make that green bit there?”

“Umm...”

“See how these two are next to each other and they turn into green? What are they?”

“Yellow. And Blue.”

“Yes, that’s it! Yellow and blue make green!” Nanny offered the paints to him again with that little smile that both Aziraphale and the child knew signalled time for a spot of harmless mischief. “I wonder what happens when you mix all of the colours together?”

A minute later, the first sheet of paper was a colourful mess of paints, with a large brown splodge in the centre.

Ashtoreth took the painting away and laid it on the table next to Brother Francis to dry. On the next sheet of paper, she dipped one long finger into the red paint and drew a stick figure, talking the little Antichrist through how to use his fingertips like pencils, rather than just using the whole surface of his hands. He copied her carefully, and was overjoyed at the rather wonky-looking result. The page was soon covered in carefully-finger-painted lines and circles and dots, some roughly assembled into approximations of the human form, others scattered about just for the fun of it.

This time when Nanny Ashtoreth replaced the page and took the finished one away for drying, she didn’t step back onto the increasingly-multicoloured plastic sheet. Instead, she sat down next to Brother Francis and the two of them watched together as Warlock used his fingers to mix colours on the floor and prepared to paint his masterpiece.

“He’s so engaged,” Aziraphale commented softly, low enough that he didn’t have to put on his gardener voice. “You can see how much he loves to learn.”

“They’re always like that to begin with,” the demon beside him murmured.

There was a lifetime of experience behind those words, a hundred lifetimes. They’d both been here from the Beginning, after all, since the very first child was born and learned how to learn for the very first time. Crowley was the one who most understood them at that age, though.

Aziraphale was interested in discussions about things that most children had never encountered yet, making conversation difficult. He also preferred things that were rational and plausible, and was frequently baffled by the leaps and links of any given child’s logic. Crowley was interested in sharing knowledge, in asking and answering questions, and was always ready with something to say no matter how often the child in question asked ‘why’. Which made a lot of sense, coming from the Serpent of Eden.

“Sometimes I wonder if they’re not always like that,” Aziraphale mused. “It’s just that the urge to learn is sometimes... superseded by more pressing matters.”

“Or trained out of them,” Crowley said glumly.

“That too. It’s a shame, really. What is humanity if not individuals supporting each other in a quest for knowledge?”

The demon looked at him sideways. “Isn’t that a little blasphemous for an angel?”

Aziraphale baulked. “What?”

“Well, if that’s your definition, then they weren’t even really human until they went on their little quest for knowledge.” Crowley lowered her sunglasses a little and winked one golden eye at the angel. “Means my temptation is really what made them into humanity.”

Aziraphale spluttered indignantly, but Warlock interrupted before he could come up with any sort of argument to the contrary.

“Look, Nanny, look!” the child cried happily, pointing at the easel.

“Oh wow!” the demon said, switching easily back into her Ashtoreth accent. “What a beautiful painting, my little Adversary!”

“ _My_ Adversary, surely,” Aziraphale muttered. Nanny elbowed him in the side and stood up to get a proper look at the boy’s artwork.

It was a lovely piece. The centre of the paper was occupied by a large blob of wet, red paint, carefully sculpted by tiny fingers into the shape of flower petals. A dark stalk tracked straight down into a bed of vibrantly green grass, and the whole top left corner of the painting was occupied by an orange-yellow sun. It was bold and bright and beautiful, and Nanny Ashtoreth knew at once it would be a favourite of hers.

“It’s a rose!” Warlock said proudly. “Like the ones Brother Francis has in the garden.”

“So it is!” Francis’s voice said warmly. Nanny glanced behind her and saw that the gardener had stood up to get a better look, but had only gone as far as the edge of the plastic sheet. She couldn’t help but smile a little at that, however cynically – Aziraphale always was one to keep his hands clean.

“Let’s lay it flat to dry, shall we?” Nanny said. “And then I can pin it up with the others.”

She gestured to the noticeboard on the wall that was currently filled with sheets of paper that Warlock had scribbled on in a range of coloured pencils. There wasn’t quite enough room up there for the large painting, but she could always take a few down and stow them safely away. Crowley already had a box for just such a purpose, in fact – ostensibly a collection of evidence of the Antichrist’s growing aptitude for learning and chaos, in actuality more a sentimental accumulation of materials that symbolised their time together. Their rapidly-slipping-away time.

Humans grew up too fast, was the problem. And this one was only being given half a chance at it, if that; eleven years. Eleven years old, that’s how old he’d be when Armageddon finally got started. Barely over a decade on the planet, and somehow meant to know what to do with the whole thing. Crowley had been here for more than six _thousand_ years longer, and even _she_ still had no idea how to go about that. It was a ridiculous amount of pressure to put on a child. Even if he wasn't wholly human.

Crowley pushed away those unhelpful thoughts and set about cleaning Warlock up. He’d managed to get the paint everywhere, including his own hair, but that would wash out easily in the bath later. And even if it didn’t, one tiny miracle wouldn’t hurt. He’d never even notice.

Paint removed, Nanny Ashtoreth shooed her charge off the sheet to play with his toys in the corner of the room, and set about putting the paints away. Brother Francis helped by attempting to figure out how to collapse the easel again – though he eventually decided it wasn’t worth the effort, instead tucking it away in the corner of the room, still assembled. Nanny cleaned down the plastic sheet, and then they folded it together, as Warlock began acting out some wild, incomprehensible story with his toy dinosaurs.

“Children are exhausting,” Francis declared when the two celestials-masquerading-as-humans collapsed back into their chairs again. “I honestly don’t know how you do it.”

“And I don’t know how you garden without talking to the plants,” Ashtoreth grinned. She glanced in the direction of the door, checking it was still shut, then relaxed from her straight-backed Nanny pose into a sprawling, snake-like state that felt more like Crowley.

“It’s funny, isn’t it,” Aziraphale said quietly, similarly sounding like himself again. His eyes were following Warlock as he raced around the room, pretending to control ten or more different dinosaur characters in this little one-person game.

“Hmm?” Crowley prompted.

“The fact that they all started out like this, and became what they became. Jane. Vincent. Your Leo. They all started out in the same place. None of them could hold a pen or a paintbrush at first. But they _grew_ , they _learned_ , and they all become such _unique_ people. And I can’t help but think–” Aziraphale cut himself off with a soft gasp, and Crowley pretended she hadn’t noticed the sudden wetness of his eyes.

Aziraphale looked down at his hands, fidgeting as they were in his lap, and took a breath. “I think about it. Every day. I think about this sweet little boy, and his laughter and his messy painting and his made-up stories, and I wonder... I wonder who he’s going to be.”

Crowley couldn’t help it. It only took a tiny movement, with how close they were sat together. She reached out and put a long-fingered hand over Aziraphale’s, stilling them gently. “I know, angel,” she murmured. “I know.”

She knew not to overstay her welcome. She knew not to move too fast. She squeezed once – supportively, nothing more – then removed her hand and placed it safely into her own lap, looking steadfastly ahead at Warlock the whole time. She gave Aziraphale a minute or two to compose himself, before carrying on like nothing had happened.

Then her mind, still processing certain parts of what the angel had said, caught on something.

“Hang on, _my_ Leo?” She glanced incredulously at Aziraphale, who she was relieved to see was no longer looking like his heart was about to break. “Why’s he mine? You were just as much friends with him as I was.”

The angel looked at her sideways, one eyebrow raised. “Now that’s definitely not true. You and Leo were close friends. I was more... an acquaintance, if anything.” He paused, then said with a frown, “I’m not even sure he _liked_ me.”

“ _What?_ ” Crowley said, louder than she should but appalled enough to forget to use Nanny’s accent. “Of course he _liked_ you, angel! Why wouldn’t he?”

“Oh, nothing specific. He was always very civil. I just... sometimes got the impression I was... I’m not sure what the right phrase is. On probation?”

Crowley gaped for a moment, consonants tripping over themselves in an attempt to form words and refusing to let any vowels get a sound in edgeways. “That’s not – no, no!” she managed eventually. “No, I specifically remember having a conversation with him about you! He liked you, I know he did! He said so!”

Aziraphale seemed sceptical. “You were talking about me with him?”

“Yeah! We were–”

And then Crowley remembered exactly what they’d been talking about, she and Leo, and cut herself off.

“He liked you,” she finished in a weak mutter.

Warlock didn’t seem to have noticed the miniature outburst, nor was he paying attention to the fact that his Nanny and gardener were no longer using their usual accents. He continued to play with his plastic dinosaurs, completely unaware of anything besides himself.

“Perhaps Leo was just trying to spare your feelings, since he knew we were friends,” Aziraphale suggested.

“Nah, it wasn’t that.”

Crowley took a breath. She watched the little boy in their care dance around with his toys, and tried to use his carefree joy as strength. All that positivity and honesty and hope. She’d need that, for a confession like this.

“I think he was, you know. Worried for me.”

“Worried for you?”

“Concerned. About... about me. As a friend. And so he was... wary. Of you.”

“Of me.” Aziraphale was staring at her now, she could tell from the corner of her vision. He clearly didn’t get it, didn’t understand what she was trying to say.

“He knew–” Crowley closed her eyes briefly, tried to figure out how to say this without saying it. “He knew a little of what our situation was," she said carefully. “And so he was wary of you. Because, as you said, we were close friends. And he didn’t want to see me get hurt.”

Aziraphale was still looking confused. She took a breath, and bit the bullet.

“He didn’t want you to hurt me.”

The silence hung heavy between them, like a moment suspended in time. Crowley didn’t dare look at Aziraphale. She only hoped he understood, hoped he forgave her for it, hoped he wouldn’t ever bring it up again.

Warlock, too young to have any awareness of the sudden quiet tension between the two of them, continued to play around with his toys, making his little plastic Stegosaurus roar and bite at the neck of a T-rex. He hadn’t been taught the difference between herbivores and carnivores yet, let alone which was which. Crowley half expected Aziraphale to take the opportunity to do so now, and escape this terrifying little moment of honesty. He didn’t.

“And I did, didn’t I?”

It was phrased as a question, but it didn’t sound like one. It was flat, heavy, true. Crowley bit her lip.

“Angel, it– it wasn’t your fault...”

“No, it was. I shouldn’t have–” Aziraphale took a breath. “I’m sorry, my dear. I’m sorry that I hurt you.”

“I hurt you too,” Crowley breathed. “By asking.”

“But I shouldn’t have shut you out. I should have talked to you, tried to understand. And for that I am truly sorry.”

For a moment, Crowley didn’t know what to do. She wanted to reach out to him, somehow, to comfort him even as he was apologising, to stop him from feeling guilt about this at all. It wasn’t his fault really. Or at least, if it was, she understood why. She wouldn’t return to Heaven for all the world, not even if they welcomed her with open arms, because she’d seen what they did to even the best among them. She’d seen how they treated Aziraphale, seen how nervous he was around them. That wasn’t love, or comfort, or protection. And with that as all the angel knew – of course he’d be scared. Of course he wouldn’t want to risk them being found out. Of course he’d be afraid of what punishment an angel _fraternising_ with a demon might be dealt. So it wasn’t really his fault.

That said, it had still hurt.

Just as she was wondering whether it would mean anything for a demon to offer something like forgiveness to an angel, her heart stopped in her chest. Because there was a sudden warm presence resting on the hands in her lap.

Crowley looked down, and found Aziraphale’s fingers squeezing her own, in much the same gesture she’d given him earlier. She couldn’t do anything more than stare.

The angel squeezed again, and began to withdraw. Without thinking, her right hand twisted and grabbed, holding onto his with a sudden urgency, a desperate need to be understood.

Words had never been Crowley’s forte – they had always been Aziraphale’s department, those endless tomes filling the infinite extra-dimensional space of the bookshop – but perhaps this much she could manage. A hand held – not for long, no, she couldn’t hold him here forever, she couldn’t go too fast – a hand squeezed again, in thanks, in support, in love. Then she released him and looked away, trying to ignore the burning sensation in her face, her ears, her chest.

Warlock interrupted them a few minutes later, thrusting plastic dinosaurs at them and commanding them to roar. Perhaps the moment would be forgotten. Perhaps it would be ignored, the participants pretending, as they so often did, that nothing had ever happened between them.

Or perhaps, just possibly, the memory of that touch – _palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss_ – would be kept close, secret and safe, by each of them. And one day, when Warlock and the Antichrist had turned eleven and the horsepersons had been summoned and the armies of Heaven and Hell had been prepared to fight – and then somehow the world _didn’t_ end – perhaps then they would touch hands again, and hold on a little longer. On a bus, maybe, from Oxfordshire to London. Or in a Mayfair Flat. Or on a park bench.

Perhaps, even, all of those times and more.

**Author's Note:**

> 1 Yes, technically the extensive grounds of the Dowlings’ residence did require daily work to maintain. But Aziraphale had put a very convincing argument to Gabriel that miracles to sort out the grass or weeds or to precisely trim a hedge would indeed be necessary from time to time to ensure that Brother Francis kept his very competitive job at the American Ambassador’s house and would thus be able to continue influencing the young Antichrist. Which meant, on the odd occasion, Aziraphale could happily miracle away his tasks for the day in favour of spending some time with Crowley. Primarily to influence Warlock towards goodness, of course. [return to text]


End file.
